


These Old Haunts

by Abbie



Category: Arrow (TV 2012)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Gen, Ghosts, Haunting, not as much angst as it looks like, this is how I process the season finale
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-06-28
Updated: 2014-10-14
Packaged: 2017-12-16 10:46:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 12,010
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/861211
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Abbie/pseuds/Abbie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tommy Merlyn shouldn’t have meant hardly anything at all to Felicity Smoak. But, strangely enough, a person came to matter more than one might expect when you listened to them die.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. I'm not calling you a ghost (just stop haunting me)

**Author's Note:**

> Feel free to place any and all blame for this one at the feet of redtoes. I am SUPPOSED to be retired from fanfiction. Every time I think I'm out, they pull me back in.

  
The first time Felicity saw Tommy Merlyn post mortem was in the photographs attached to his autopsy report.

She couldn’t say what made her hack into the SCPD’s systems and dig it—dig him—up. Morbid curiosity? Guilt? It was playing with fire, illegally accessing the police’s records after so recently nearly being arrested for aiding and abetting the vigilante criminal known as the Hood. But she had learned from that mistake, and Felicity Smoak wasn’t getting caught twice.

It wasn’t as if anything in the coroner’s report was going to be a surprise, or unusual, or helpful in any way. Tommy hadn’t been murdered, or died under mysterious circumstances requiring investigation. His death was open and shut. Impaled on a piece of rebar after rescuing his ex-girlfriend during the fall of the East Glades. Torn muscle and flesh, shattered bones, a punctured lung. Bled out.

She hadn’t even really known him. They’d been passing acquaintances at best. Really, she’d been kind of surprised every time he’d actually managed to remember her name. Although, she supposed, it probably helped her stick in his memory that she was part of the two-person support structure assisting Tommy’s best friend’s extra-legal activities. Yeah... given how he’d very clearly felt about Oliver’s whole double life, maybe his knowing her name shouldn’t have been so surprising. But still, they hadn’t been friends, never really spoke. Just the occasional brief, sometimes awkward bits of small talk while she waited around the club on Oliver and Diggle, and Tommy hustled about keeping the place running.

Tommy Merlyn shouldn’t have meant hardly anything at all to Felicity Smoak. But, strangely enough, a person came to matter more than one might expect when you listened to them die.

Felicity hadn’t meant to intrude on so... so terrible and _intimate_ a moment as the one shared between Oliver and Tommy in the collapsing ruins of CNRI. But Oliver hadn’t turned off his comm link, and Felicity was fairly sure he’d forgotten completely that she’d been just on the other end of the connection in his ear while his best friend’s life slipped literally through his hands.

As Felicity had realized what she was hearing, horrified, she had wanted to shut the connection down. She had no business in that moment. But it was a man’s last words, his last moments, and turning that off like a bad song on the radio had seemed grossly disrespectful. Callous and just _wrong_.

So she was there, half a city district away, hand plastered across her mouth and tears in her eyes, as Tommy slipped away, and Oliver’s heart broke in her ears.

She never had the heart to tell Oliver that she’d been witness to it. And either he didn’t know, or he was determined to pretend he didn’t, and never so much as obliquely reference it.

Only now Tommy Merlyn was haunting Felicity. His last breaths, the bubbling hitch, his final words. The lie of kindness Oliver let him believe at the end. They replayed in her head night after night in the darkness, chasing away sleep, leaving her with smudges under her eyes, bitten nails, frayed nerves, and a heavy heart.

She was grieving a man she hadn’t even really known, and she didn’t feel she even had permission to mourn. That belonged as the sole province of the people who’d loved him in life. Oliver, Thea, and Laurel. Who was she to claim grief over his death? No one. She was a ghost in the background of these people’s lives, and now the death of Tommy was a specter in the background of hers.

So she found herself, a week after the tumultuous results of the Undertaking, sitting in the darkened and still dusty foundry, alone with the photos of a waxy-faced Tommy, trying to find some way, any way, to exorcise him out of her head.

When she finally backtraced her way out of SCPD’s system, shut the computers down, and headed for home, Felicity still didn’t feel any less haunted.

—

The second time Felicity saw Tommy after his death was the real thing. Or the cold husk of it, anyways.

She felt compelled to attend the viewing and funeral. Oliver had mentioned the event in a rather passing way, not exactly an invitation, but why would he say when and where it was if she wasn’t to come? At any rate, by then she was far too consumed with guilt and that strange mourning to care whether or not she was welcome.

She hid the dark circles from her two and a half weeks of sleepless nights with heavy concealer, smoothed her curls and clipped them into a demure ponytail at the base of her neck, and put on a simple black dress and knitted shrug. After following in the procession from the funeral parlor viewing to the cemetery, Felicity stood several feet back from the open grave, glad she’d chosen simple black flats over heels that would have sunk into the damp, loamy soil of the graveyard.

She didn’t hear a word the old guy with the Bible said. Mostly she stared across the grass to the other side of the gravesite, where the near and dear of Tommy Merlyn gathered under a small awning.

Oliver stood with his arm around Thea, who occasionally, angrily swiped tears from her cheeks with a handkerchief. Oliver himself stared at the closed casket, and from here, his face could’ve been carved from stone, utterly bereft of expression. But Felicity had seen him earlier at the foundry, and knew his red-rimmed eyes, even dry, gave him away.

Laurel Lance stood at the opposite corner of the awning from the Queen siblings, beautiful in her grief and black dress with the long, fitted lace sleeves. Her father the detective stood at her side, wearing a somber charcoal suit and his customary gruff expression, one arm protectively curved around his daughter’s back. Felicity very much did not want to catch his eye.

Quite a ways beyond the mourners, Felicity saw two men with rigid postures and functional black suits pass each other on their circuit around the graveside service. She thought one might be Diggle.

Between the press and angry, target-hungry citizens, it had made sense to have a strong security presence at the burial of the younger Merlyn, nevermind that neither he nor the Queen children had been complicit in their parents’ deadly plans. Oliver had volunteered his bodyguard’s services, and John was really the only reason Felicity had been allowed in. Apparently the funeral was an exclusive, invitation-only event.

Felicity wondered if Tommy would have been amused that his funeral required bouncers. She thought it was kind of funny how much she felt like an undeserving line-jumper, standing scant yards from his casket as if she had any right.

At last, the elderly man closed his Bible and stepped away. For a moment, Felicity thought Laurel might speak, but after several seconds, men from the funeral parlor stepped forward to operate the machinery that would lower Tommy’s casket into the waiting grave. As everyone waited in quiet respect for the whirring mechanisms to silence, Felicity supposed it was no surprise that no one read a eulogy. Laurel seemed lost in the kind of grief that lacked for words, and Thea, even from across the grave site, was obviously too entrenched in the anger stage of mourning to speak.

Felicity hadn’t ever really expected that Oliver would have anything to say here. He’d already given Tommy the only words he had after his best friend’s death.

_It should have been me._

Felicity glanced again at Oliver and, when she found his eyes on her, jumped, startled. Holding his gaze, she sucked her lower lip between her teeth to stop an awkward, meant-to-be-reassuring smile from forming. He blinked, and she looked away.

Finally, the casket came to rest, and Laurel moved forward, followed by her father, Thea, Oliver, and others from the small group beneath the awning, who each stopped to scoop a handful of earth from the mound to one side of the grave. The line moved slowly as each person tossed in their fistful of dirt and said their last goodbyes. When they had finished, the funeral began to break up, and some people milled about, murmuring in hushed tones to one another, and others made their way towards the cemetery gates and the waiting line of hired cars and limousines. Felicity’s little red Mini Cooper was parked down the street.

For just a second, she hesitated, looking again through the thinning crowd for Oliver. She found him holding both his sister’s hands in his, looking earnest and speaking to her in low tones.

It was time for her to leave. She didn’t belong here anyways.

As she turned to go, for the barest moment, her eyes caught on a lean figure in a well-cut gray suit and open-collared blue shirt, with dark, short hair and light eyes, standing slightly apart from everyone by the dirt mound. As she blinked and stumbled, her head snapped round for a double take, but on second look, there was no one there.

Felicity frantically scanned nearby faces, but the… the _figure_ had vanished, and nobody else seemed to notice what had alarmingly appeared to be _Tommy Merlyn_ at _Tommy Merlyn’s_ funeral. Probably just the lack of sleep. It was either the downside of chronic insomnia or an oncoming break with reality. She resolved then and there to just down some NyQuil before bed tonight and hope she was not in fact losing her mind.

Shaking her head at herself, Felicity reached into the pocket of her dress—god, did she ever love dresses with pockets, pockets were magical—to make sure she had her keys and headed for the gates.

As the intimidating wrought iron entry loomed ahead, Diggle hailed her with a wave from a short distance away, then jogged towards her as she stepped just off the path to let others pass around her.

“Hey,” John greeted her, “you heading home?”

Felicity gave him a weak smile, fingers toying absently with the thin red belt at her waist that matched her lipstick. “Yeah. I’d offer my condolences back there but, uh, kinda hard to explain to Laurel why Oliver Queen’s IT girl even rates an invite to Tommy Merlyn’s funeral, y’know?”

John’s answering smile was wry. “I hear you. We are not to be seen _or_ heard if at all possible, right? You catching a cab?”

Felicity shook her head. “No, my car’s parked just a little ways down the block.”

“Felicity,” John began, his tone warning and his mouth pursing into that displeased moue he usually reserved for Oliver. “Why don’t you wait here a second and let me walk you out, then.”

Felicity made a face. “Digg, I am walking half a block to my car and it’s not even sunset. I’m pretty sure I’m not gonna get mugged in the five minutes I am unescorted on the sidewalk. It’s like four in the afternoon. In May.” His brows lowered obstinately, but she cut across him as he opened his mouth to argue. “Look, if somebody takes a run at me, I’ll have a chance to try out the self-defense moves you’ve been drilling me in. Besides, you know Oliver’s going to be itching to get out of here any second, and it could look weird if Oliver Queen’s bodyguard-slash-driver insists on walking some random QC employee to her car first. You _know_ there are paparazzi creeps lurking just outside. Felicity Smoak, IT maven? Nobody worth noticing. Felicity Smoak leaving Tommy Merlyn’s funeral accompanied by Oliver and Thea Queen? _That_ might sell to a gossip rag or two.”

Diggle exhaled harshly from his nose, clearly not happy with the rambling logic of her argument. “Fine. But you text me when you get home, got it?”

Felicity’s mouth quirked up on one side fondly. “Sure thing, Dad.”

With a murmured goodbye, the two parted, and Felicity made her escape from the cemetery and past the waiting press mob unremarked.

 


	2. You sleep in dust

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am so very sorry to have taken such an ungodly amount of time getting this next chapter out. If it makes up for it at all, it's roughly three times longer than chapter 1. Immeasurable thanks for cheerleading, nerve-soothing, and all-things-made-better-ing go to redtoes and ferggirl. All mistakes are, of course, mine and mine only.

_“It should have been me.”_

Felicity groaned in her sleep, fingers and eyelids twitching as she lay on her side. Her brow furrowed, lips forming the word “no.” Her head turned against her comforter, the memory of the echoing thuds of chunks of concrete falling around her in the foundry. Her funeral dress, wrinkled and rumpled now, rustled as she rolled onto her back.

_“Open your eyes, Tommy! Open your eyes!”_

With a gasp, Felicity’s eyes flew open as it registered that the thudding wasn’t memory, but an insistent knocking on her apartment door, echoing down the hallway and through the open door of her bedroom.

For a moment, Felicity froze, mouth open, and stared up at the fuzzy image of Tommy Merlyn’s perplexed face floating above her. He looked exactly as he had any number of the times she’d seen him at Verdant, in a crisp blue dress shirt under a charcoal black blazer. He stared down at her, as if she were an unexpected puzzle that was slightly inconveniencing him. It wasn’t an expression she could claim to have pulled from the reference of her few memories of him, and a distant, still slightly sleepy portion of Felicity’s brain congratulated her imagination on its creativity.

The knocking on her door at that instant became more of a demanding banging, and Felicity yelped, sitting up on reflex. Blinking, she looked around her well-lit bedroom, heart pounding with fear and confusion. She was, of course, alone.

Except for the assault at her front door, anyways.       

Swearing, Felicity shook off the lingering nightmare and accompanying delusions and pushed herself off her bed. She had only meant to lie down a moment, then grab a shower. She hadn’t even made it to getting out of her funeral clothes.

Felicity shouted an irritable “hold on” down the hallway, hoping whoever the hell was trying to break down her door heard her and would give her the chance to at least grab her glasses before they tore the damn thing off its hinges. That was _not_ a conversation she wanted to have with her cranky building super.

Snatching her glasses off the dresser where she’d laid them, she put them on and hurried down the hall, reaching back and wincing at the rat’s nest her unintended nap had turned her hair into.

She was yards away from the door when the pounding resumed, hard enough to visibly rattle the wood in the frame. Too irritated to think of safety, Felicity threw back the two dead bolts and flung the door open, prepared to sear the jackass on the other side with her best glare.

The jackass in question was, in fact, Oliver Queen.

“Oliver—” the wind went right out of Felicity’s sails to be replaced by confusion. “What in the hell are you doing here, and why are you trying to kick my door in?”

Oliver stood staring at her, his expression frozen in that place between fierce determination and incredulous relief. “Felicity, I have been knocking on this door for nearly _ten minutes_ , and trying to call you for almost fifteen before that. Why in _hell_ didn’t you answer?”

Felicity’s face screwed up in concern. “I fell asleep! What on earth is going on, did something happen?” She froze, eyes going wide and hand flying to her throat. “ _What_ happened, Oliver, is somebody hurt? Is, is—what is it, is Thea okay, is John? Was it the paparazzi, or, oh god, was there a riot or something—”

“ _Felicity_ ,” Oliver interrupted, his hands coming down briefly on her shoulders. He was looking at her like he couldn’t believe her, like she’d lost her mind. He stepped back, one hand falling to his side, the other running over his hair. “You were supposed to text or call Digg nearly an _hour_ ago to let him know you got home safe.” His hands balled into fists, jaw clenching so hard the veins in his neck stood out. “We thought something had happened to you! Your phone GPS said you were home, and then you weren’t answering the _goddamn_ door.”

Felicity felt her shoulders hunch as she curled her fingers in her wrinkled skirt. She couldn’t _believe_ she’d forgotten to text Digg. “Oliver, I’m—I’m sorry. I just, I _completely_ forgot, and I accidentally fell asleep like five minutes after I got in the door.” She brought her hands to her mouth, then twisted them together at her waist. “I am _so_ sorry, I didn’t mean to worry you guys. Should—should I call John, let him know everything’s okay? God, I need to apologize, he made me promise and then I forgot like an _idiot_.”

Oliver shook his head and backed up to lean against the opposite corridor wall, both hands scrubbing over his face before dropping loosely to his sides. His expression was less intense when he looked at her again, though Felicity could tell he was still plenty peeved. “Digg’s downstairs keeping the car running, if you’d prefer to grovel for forgiveness in person.”

Felicity winced. “He’s gonna be mad, you think?”

Oliver snorted, expression softening slightly with a wry smirk and raised eyebrow. “Maybe not so much mad as _disappointed_. Which I think is probably worse. To be honest, I think you might be lucky if you get out of this one without him putting a tracker in  _your_ boot.”

Felicity tentatively smiled back at him. “Good thing I almost never wear boots, then. It’s probably harder to lo-jack ballet flats.”

He huffed slightly in response, and Felicity suddenly realized he was no longer dressed in his funeral suit, but instead in worn-looking jeans and his leather jacket over a gray T-shirt. Mouth puckering to one side in consideration, Felicity wondered why Oliver was dressed, or so it seemed to her, in rough-work clothes. “Were... you guys heading somewhere?” She paused, lips drawing down into a frown. “You weren’t planning on some kind of mission without even telling me, were you?”

Oliver shook his head, his expression sliding into something she couldn’t quite read. “No. No... missions or anything for a while still, I think. Diggle and I were going to head to Verdant to do some more recovery on the foundry when he told me you still hadn’t checked in.”

Felicity grimaced again at the reminder of her screw up, then jolted upright with a thought. “Wait, do you mind if I come with you guys? I mean, I know I may not be a lot of use clearing debris, but I can take a look at how extensive the damage to the wiring was, maybe come up with an estimate for what we need to fix, maybe some upgrades...”

She tried not to sound too wheedling and hopeful, but to be honest, the idea of being around the boys for a few hours, having something to do, and _not_ being alone in her apartment where she was apparently having hallucinations about Oliver’s dead best friend sounded like exactly what she needed. She was sure she wasn’t going to be getting any more sleep anytime soon.

Oliver hesitated a moment, then nodded. “Alright, couldn’t hurt to get an expert opinion before we let the contractors give us their estimate next week. Besides, _they’ll_ be estimating what the club needs. _You_ will know what _we_ need.”

Felicity smiled brightly at him, both at the casual compliment and at the reassurance that there was still a _we_ with needs she could be useful for. She had certainly entertained a few worries that Oliver might want to shut their activities down, hang up the Hood and send her off with a “so long and thanks for all the fish.” She wouldn’t have blamed him if that was the choice he’d decided to make, but she couldn’t help the thrill of relief that went through her that he hadn’t.

“Great,” she said. “Just give me five minutes to change and clean up and I’ll be right down. Tell Digg I’m sorry?”

Oliver’s eyebrow was on the rise again as he pointed at her accusingly, “Oh no, you’re not getting off that easy. You make your own apologies. And if you’re not downstairs in the car in ten minutes max, I am coming back up here to haul you down over my shoulder.”

Felicity rolled her eyes and began to turn to go back into the apartment. “Five minutes, keep your shirt on.”

It was only after she closed the door on his suppressed grin that she realized what she’d said, and exactly who she said it to.

—

Seven and a half minutes later, Felicity hurriedly exited her apartment building, dressed for work and grime in a pair of well broken-in jeans, bright yellow Chucks, and a Captain America tee shirt. She had decided to ditch the glasses for contacts. She finished tying her hair off into an out-of-the-way topknot just as she reached the black BMW idling in the drop-off zone by the curb.  
  
Before she could reach for the door, it opened towards her, Oliver leaning out to look at her with raised eyebrows. She shooed at him impatiently with her hands, climbing in as Oliver slid across the seat towards the far door.  
  
Felicity shut the door, took a deep breath, and raised her eyes to meet John’s where he was turned towards them in the driver’s seat, one elbow propped beside the headrest. His expression was expectant, and none too amused, and Oliver was right, the disappointment expressed in the quirk of his brows was much worse than anger. Wincing, Felicity dove right in. “I am _so sorry_ , John, I never meant to alarm you or worry you, and I _promised_ you and then I broke my word. I just, I came in after I got home, and I swear I was just gonna lay down for a _second_ but I fell asleep, and I know, it’s a shitty excuse, I should’ve texted you immediately. And I didn’t, and I’m sorry.”  
  
John snorted. “Damn right, you should’ve. Felicity, I’m not trying to be a hardass, and I’m sure as hell not trying to mother hen you, but after all the crap we’ve been through in the last couple of months, and the climate in the city right now, we don’t need to take any chances.” He shook his head once, but softened it with a small smirk. “I know it sounds damn clichéd, but we’ve got to stick together. I can’t be constantly worrying about you,” he suddenly shot a loaded glance at Oliver, who shifted slightly in his seat, “ _either_ of you. We check in with each other, we watch each other’s backs. Got it?”  
  
“Got it,” Felicity mumbled, chastised. Oliver offered no more than a slightly sarcastic salute, at which John rolled his eyes and turned around to put the car in drive.

As the car joined the flow of early evening traffic, Felicity double checked the satchel she’d brought along for her tool kits, tablet, phone, and assorted essentials. She couldn’t be sure how much access she would have to the control panels and wiring in the foundry, but she wanted to be prepared to really get in there and take a good look. She hadn’t seen the damage Verdant had taken since she’d literally clawed her way out of the basement that fateful night, but she was beginning to formulate a plan to propose to the boys about some upgrades to their vigilante lair which she had been wanting to suggest for months now.

Felicity turned her head to mention the possibility to Oliver and was startled to find him already looking at her. He had one elbow propped on the windowsill of his door and his hand cradling his jaw, two fingers laid across his lips as he stared quizzically at her. Or, to be more specific, at her mouth.

Felicity’s brows drew together and she shrank back against her door involuntarily. Raising fingertips to her mouth, she stared at Oliver and felt around her chin and lips for smears of lipstick or dried toothpaste. “Oliver, why are you staring at me? Not to be a cliché, but is there something on my face?”

Oliver tilted his head a little more to one side, his hand fisting beside his cheek as he raised his eyes to hers. “Your lipstick. It’s pink.”

Felicity couldn’t help the way her eyes rounded and eyebrows arched, nor could she resist shooting a look in Diggle’s direction. His eyes met hers in the rearview mirror, and while she could see the crinkles of amusement at the corners, his brows were slanting in skeptical concern. Turning back to look at Oliver, she made a face of disquieted worry at him. “Yeah, and?”

Oliver smirked at her expression, as if this line of conversation weren’t remotely odd. “It was red when you answered the door. I timed you, given the roughly two minutes it took you to get downstairs and to the car, you stuck to your five-minute claim. How the hell did you manage to change, brush your hair, put together a bag, and change your lipstick in that time? And while we’re at it, how come your lipstick _never_ smears? You bite your lips all the time, and I have seen you eat two entire hamburgers without the color even fading.”

Felicity opened her mouth, shut it again. Where was this coming from? And why now? This would be a weird line of _voluntary_ conversation from him two months ago, before everything went to shit. She had expected him to be all but vibrating with barely suppressed anger since Tommy died, anticipated the need to walk on certain egg shells. And he was cracking jokes about her lipstick? “Um. Okay.” Felicity self-consciously tucked her lips between her teeth as Oliver raised his brows expectantly, then she blew out a breath and blinked at him. “It’s... long-lasting lip stain—or, you know what? Let’s just go with ‘girl magic’, alright Oliver?”

He shrugged at her in response as if she were the one acting strangely. Felicity shook her head, a seed of worry about her friend and partner in crimefighting planting in the back of her head.

Drawing a breath, she glanced again at John, whose eyes were back on the road, but brows lowered ominously, then turned back to face Oliver. Time for a change of subject. “So, did you just drop Thea off at home—after? Or—”

Oliver’s reaction was immediate, shoulders tensing, jaw squaring as he turned to face the window instead. “We dropped her off to meet Harper.”

Felicity raised her eyebrows at his abruptly cooler tone and harshly clipped words. “Roy Harper? Her boyfriend? The one on a crusade to find _you_?” She watched his shoulders bunch tighter the more she spoke and winced. “Um. Okay then. Awkward.”

Oliver said nothing, pointedly, though the cough from the front seat was a bit more eloquent. Next subject. “Okay. So. Have you... heard anything about what’s happening with QC? They haven’t downgraded the security threat level enough for us to come back to work yet, so...” Felicity wouldn’t have thought Oliver’s posture could have gotten more tense, but clearly she would have been wrong. Wow, she was really batting a thousand tonight. “Just... wondering...”

Oliver steadfastly said nothing, so John snorted in the driver’s seat and answered for him. “The board of directors has approached him about taking CEO. Twice. This week.”

Felicity’s eyebrows climbed towards her hairline, and she looked at Oliver again, who had at least turned to face forward, if only to glare at the rearview mirror. “So... do you have a plan? Because, and this is just my thoughts, but I don’t think that ‘I’m too irresponsible and stupid and busy being an entitled rich asshole’ skit is going to work as well a second time.”

Oliver cut her a scathing look. “Thank you for that kindly-worded opinion, Felicity.” She shrugged at him, not at all sorry, especially when she was rewarded by the slightest twitch of his lips in an upward, amused direction. “I keep telling them I’m not the person for the job. Between my lack of experience and the baggage attached to the Queen name lately, having a Queen helming Queen Consolidated isn’t as sound a business strategy as it might seem. But they’re getting desperate, and so, persistent.” He ran a hand harshly over his hair; it was getting to be in need of a trim. “I’ve been talking to Walter. Trying to convince him to come back, if only for the interim.”

Felicity perked up at the mention of her former boss. “That would be great! I mean, the company is already familiar territory for him, and the employees all have a favorable opinion of him. He was a really easy boss to like. And he’s already got a solid reputation for managing QC post Queen-related crises, so, there’s that.”

Oliver glanced at her again, his expression speaking volumes about her word choices. She felt her cheeks burn, and mouthed a “sorry” at him, which he just rolled his eyes at and waved off. He might not always let her lack of verbal filter slide gracefully, but he was at least pretty used to her foot-in-mouth syndrome acting up by now.

Still, when John pulled to a stop in the small employee parking lot behind Verdant, it was not without relief that Felicity gathered her bag and the scraps of her dignity and exited the vehicle.

As the men got out of the car, Felicity craned her neck back and surveyed the back of the club, looking almost entirely unscathed by the Markov Device’s quake. Verdant’s block was on the outermost edge of the hardest-hit district of the Glades, and from outside, appeared to have gotten entirely lucky. And though Felicity hadn’t been back since that fated night, she knew all too well how appearances deceived.

“Well. At least there doesn’t appear to be any serious structural damage.”

“Nah,” John said, coming up to stand beside her, hands shoved into his jeans pockets. It was still so weird to see him in denim and a tee shirt. “She’s just a giant cement block. Hard to knock over the warehouse bones of the place.”

Oliver drew up beside him. “I had a surveyor out last week. The foundation is, thankfully, intact. All the damage is interior, and most of it’s pretty minor, superficial stuff, relatively speaking.” He cut a quick glance over to Felicity, caught her eyes for an unreadable moment, then swung his gaze back to the club. “The basement was the hardest hit, really.”

Felicity blinked, chewed at her bottom lip, then sucked in a breath and drew back her shoulders. “Well, we’re not getting anything put to rights standing around out here. Is there at least electricity?”

The three began to walk the short distance to the thick metal employee door. Oliver “hmm”ed. “Had the power turned back on three days ago, after this block’s grid was cleared by the city as uncompromised. We’re good to go.”

Felicity nodded, stopping beside John while Oliver moved forward to key in the code at the pad beside the door, his physical keys jangling on a ring in his other hand. As she watched the line of his shoulders, her brows drew together. “Wait. Are either of you even actually ‘good to go’?” Oliver pushed the door slightly open, and both men turned to look at her with curiously identical expressions of patient confusion. “I mean, are you two even cleared for heavy lifting? It’s only been a little over a month since you got stabbed, Digg, and since _you_ stabbed _yourself_ , Oliver. In the shoulder. Which you use to lift things.”

John snorted and smiled at her. “Relax, Felicity. We’re good.”

She pursed her lips and tilted her head at him, eyeballing his expression for traces of bullshit. “Are you sure? Because I’ve been reading up a lot on first aid and wound recovery in the last several months, gee, I wonder why, and I’m pretty sure six weeks is still a little soon to be hauling around rubble with recently torn flesh and muscle. I’m pretty sure not even Oliver’s magical island herbs are _that_ magical.”

Oliver rolled his eyes, sighing at her, but Digg just chuckled. “Thank you for worrying about our wellbeing, Felicity, but I promise you we’ll be okay. We’re not planning to roll around large chunks of cinderblock today, anyways. We’ll start smaller, and mostly do survey and assess.”

“Now that we’ve concluded the physical exam, do you two mind if we actually go inside now? My poor, delicate, damaged shoulder is wilting under the strain of holding this door open,” Oliver drawled, eyes on Felicity.

Maturely, she stuck her tongue out at him. He smirked, then turned and stepped inside, holding the door for his companions despite his complaints. John motioned for Felicity to precede him, and she moved past Oliver into the closed-off, stifled heat of the darkened club. She stopped a few feet in, scanning the shadowed room. Dust covered the floor, and here and there, chunks of plaster or cinderblock, as well as various specialized lighting fixtures, littered the dancefloor. The door clanged heavily shut behind her and, for a moment, plunged the cavernous space into near-total darkness.

Felicity stiffened, fists curling around the strap of her bag as she sucked in a breath and held it.

Seconds later, with a muffled _whump_ , the low emergency lights along the ceiling and set in the rafters came on, though some remained dark, their bulbs shattered or wiring broken. Felicity stood still another heartbeat and slowly exhaled, then turned her head to look over her shoulder where Oliver stood by the breaker box to the right of the door. His eyes were already on her, and she found herself once again faced with that inscrutable blank mask of his. She frowned. She’d been seeing it directed at her a little too frequently over the course of the day. What she wouldn’t give to crack open Oliver Queen’s head and have a poke around the things he kept in there…

Shaking herself, she turned from his shuttered stare to get a better look at the club’s main floor. The dancefloor had a few new seams and cracks, and the DJ booth seemed to have partially collapsed in on itself, but the worst of the mess, if not the damage, seemed to be at the bar.

The bar counter itself stood sturdy, and all but one of the stools lining its front, bolted to the floor, remained firmly rooted. The rest was a disaster. Ceiling racks and shelves of glasses had crashed to their demise, littering the bartop, counter surfaces, and floor behind and around the bar with chunks and splinters of glass. A large number of bottles of liquor had also taken the plunge, adding a sticky reeking mess to the shattered glass that Felicity could smell halfway across the room.

“Damn,” she winced. “There were some really great bottles of wine behind that bar. I hope at least a few survived.”

Diggle laughed and Oliver stepped up to her left, one eyebrow raised and his mouth curved in amusement. “Maybe we’ll look later. For now, leave it. Our bigger worries are downstairs.”

Oliver moved towards the short hallway that held the door to the foundry, and Felicity, then Diggle, fell in behind him. They paused and waited for him to enter another code, and Felicity noted over his broad shoulders that the door had already been replaced. The old one had acquired a few dents the night of the Undertaking, not to mention the bit of damage Felicity had done to it with a crowbar on her way out.

When the door slid open and Oliver moved across the threshold to the landing of the stairs, Felicity paused a moment, noting that the large chunks of cement that had blocked her path had been moved by _someone_. She hoped it hadn’t been Oliver. He really shouldn’t be straining that shoulder too hard yet, not that he was especially conscientious about his own health. The parkour and armed vigilantism pretty much made “circumspect about risk of injury” a foregone conclusion.

She must have hesitated too long, because Oliver turned to offer her a reassuring nod. “The stairs have been re-secured to both the wall and the floor. There’s not a wobble or tremble in it.” He rapped his knuckles on the railing as if to demonstrate the structure’s sturdiness. “It’s perfectly safe now. Trust me.”

John’s hand landed on her shoulder, and she turned her head to look at him. He smiled reassuringly down at her. “Trust him or not, I promise I’ve got your back, Felicity.”

She smiled up at him, a rush of affection for them both warming her chest. “Thanks, guys, but I’m fine, really. Just glad to see we don’t have to rappel down into the basement. I’m not wearing the right shoes.”

Oliver smiled, shook his head, and proceeded down the stairs, throwing the switch for the foundry’s lights on his way. Felicity passed through the door and kept going, pace steady and unhurried. She kept one hand loosely on the rail and her chin up, eyes forward.

Oliver had already reached the ground and headed across the room. Felicity tracked his progress, around the chunks of concrete of various size, the tumbled equipment and bits of furniture, and on towards the area where he had kept his weapons and training equipment. Felicity found her feet on cement and stepped to one side to let John pass, hitching her bag’s strap higher on her shoulder as she looked over the largely untouched disaster that had been their base of operations.

The desk setup where she had reigned over her computers and monitors was tipped over, her electronics dusty and cracked and forgotten all around it. Her chair, she found on its side against the wall to the computer station’s left. Not far from the mess of computer carcasses, the threatening steel frame of Oliver’s salmon ladder crushed tables and equipment, one heavy corner scoring a shallow groove in the concrete floor.

Felicity stared at it. The terrifying groan of steel giving up its purchase on the ground, the deafening crash as the salmon ladder toppled, the rasp of her own harsh breathing echoing in her ears.

“Damn,” John said next to her, and if he noticed Felicity’s startled jump, he kindly ignored it. “Would you look at this place? Almost makes me wonder if it’s worth it to clean her up, or better to start from scratch somewhere else.” He turned his head to look down at her, his gaze steady but layered with meaning. “What do you think?”

 Felicity held his eyes for a long beat, searching his open face. Then, she turned and looked at Oliver, picking through one of the overturned medical carts for salvageable gear. She pulled in a deep breath, held it, and let it go. “I think… I think it’s gonna be worth it.”

She glanced back to John, whose eyes lingered on her face for a few moments longer, cool and assessing, but not unkind. At last, he inclined his head towards her as if conceding a point. “Well, alright then. If we’re gonna fix the place up, we’d better get to work. Helluva lot to do, and none of it’s gonna be easy.”  
   
He walked away, strolling across the debris-littered floor towards Oliver’s crouched form. Felicity watched him until he reached the other man, chewing absently at her lower lip, then turned away at last and headed over to the wreckage of her computer command center. For a few seconds, she merely stood over her poor, battered computers and despaired. Seeing her tech so damaged was like a wound in her soul. Sighing, she resigned herself to the fact that there was nothing for it but to see what was worth saving and what was better to break down into parts and trash.  
   
Setting her bag to one side, she situated herself cross-legged on the floor in the center of the mess, pulled the nearest CPU into her lap, dug her toolkit out of her bag, and got to work. She quickly settled into a pleasant, almost trancelike fugue of concentration, and for a blissfully unmeasured time, there was nothing in her mind but wires, circuit boards, and screws.  
   
Some while later, Felicity was sat with her hands deep in the guts of another CPU, its cover set aside to her right while she carefully, blindly teased at a loose wire with her fingertips. Almost there, almost...

“Felicity.”

Her name was accompanied by a hand dropping onto her shoulder, and Felicity squeaked and jumped, one hand pulling too fast out of the computer, leaving a thin layer of skin off her knuckles on the edge of the frame. The other hand, the fingers of which had been pinching the elusive loose wire, jerked hard, ripping the wire entirely free of its moorings.

“God… _damn_ it!” Felicity pushed the CPU corpse off her lap in disgust, her injured knuckles tucking between her lips as she turned to glare venomously up at Diggle, who leaned down, still touching her shoulder, his expression not nearly chagrined enough to suit her.

Behind him to his left, Oliver grinned, but turned his face away and hid his mouth with his hand when she turned her displeasure on him.

Diggle straightened, drawing her attention again. “We called your name from across the room, but you didn’t even hear us. You know we’ve been down here over three hours, right?”

“What?” Felicity instantly dropped her ire in surprise, snatching her cell phone out of her bag and squinting down at the time display. Sure enough, her brows climbed her forehead as the phone declared it to be almost nine p.m. “Holy crap, I feel like I haven’t even made a dent in everything that needs to be done, and this is just my little corner.” She raised her head and squinted across the room, where she had last seen the men working. The floor seemed just a bit clearer, and there was a pile of small debris off by the corner of the workout mats, but the foundry certainly wasn’t appreciably more recovered than when they’d arrive.

Oliver sighed, rubbing absently at the ever-present stubble on his jaw. “I guess getting this place in running order again isn’t going to go as quickly as I had hoped.” He scratched at his neck, eyes running the length and breadth of the room. “Nothing for it, though. We’ve just got to keep at it. And once we get all of the more suspicious debris and gear cleaned up, I can get a professional recovery crew and then the contractors down here. With luck, and a hell of a lot of money, we’ll be back in order in a month, maybe five, six weeks?”

John and Felicity exchanged a look. That seemed an optimistic estimate, considering how much time Oliver was going to need to devote to his family, Queen Consolidated, and PR. But neither of them really wanted to be the one to burst his bubble. Felicity suspected she and John would be pulling extra hours down here without Oliver, whenever they could steal time themselves.

John smiled at her, then nodded at Oliver. “Sounds like a plan. Now, here’s another. Why don’t we get the hell out of here? _You_ could stand to spend some time with your sister. Me, I would like to actually _see_ Carly and AJ in more than passing.” He looked back down to Felicity and smirked. “And _you_ could probably use some more sleep.”

Felicity hoped neither of them noticed the little shudder that went through her at that idea. Sleep was a deeply unappealing, but necessary evil she hoped to avoid for as long as the night allowed. Too many nightmares waited for her, and too many were fresh memories. She smiled up at him in answer, then quickly busied herself gathering up her tools and packing everything away into her bag.

John held down a hand to help her to her feet, and she accepted with a groan, putting one hand in the small of her back and pressing with her knuckles when she stood. “Next time, a chair. A chair and a table. Or a back brace. Something. I’m going to be paying for the last three hours of crappy posture for probably the next three days.”

“I’m pretty sure we can manage a chair and table for you,” Oliver assured, amused, as the three headed back towards the stairs.

When they emerged back upstairs into the dim, cavernous club space, Felicity tiredly headed on autopilot in the direction of the employee door they’d entered through.

“Hey, Sleeping Beauty,” Diggle called. For some reason, he and Oliver were halfway across the room in the wrong direction. He gestured as if she should join him, and Felicity gave him a look that very clearly questioned his sanity. John’s answering smirk was fond. “Thought you were hoping to scavenge some wine?”

Felicity perked up as if she’d been given an injection of espresso, and the hopeful, pleading look she shot at Oliver made him chuckle softly.

“Come on,” he beckoned her over, his long-suffering, put-upon tone at odds with the twinkle in his eye. “Let’s see what’s salvageable. And _then_ we go.”

“Yay!” Felicity bounced on her toes and clapped a little, hurrying over to join the men with a little bounce in her step. “I _love_ red wine.”

“We know,” Diggle and Oliver drawled in identical amusement.

Felicity ignored them, skipping towards the bar until she had to start watching her feet for broken glass. Several of her steps crunched, and she was infinitely glad she’d chosen somewhat sturdier Converse over her beloved flats. When she reached the bar itself, she hovered a moment, debating whether or not to forage behind the counter.  
   
Glancing over her shoulder at her approaching partners, she smirked wickedly and instead moved towards the bar stools, pushing on the nearest one to make sure it was steady before hopping up onto the seat. Just this once, she was content to let the men do the work while she sat back and supervised.  
   
Feet kicking idly back and forth, she smiled broadly at John and Oliver as the men filed behind the bar. They each gave her tolerant, knowing looks, but Felicity suspected her choice to let them play in the broken glass without her pandered to their protective macho urges at least a little, since they weren’t arguing.  
   
A comfortable silence settled over the three, as Oliver found a broom and began sweeping the dust and shards of glass into a pile off to one side and John toed around the floor for intact bottles, setting his finds beside Felicity on the countertop. Felicity leaned her elbows on the counter, watching them work without comment, just enjoying the company. Even in silence, it was nice not to be alone with her thoughts for a little longer.  
   
“Here.” After several minutes and a number of salvageable bottles of various kinds of booze, John dug out a pair of bar rags from a drawer and handed one to Felicity. “Let’s clean these up and see what we’ve got so far.”  
   
Felicity took her cloth and grabbed the neck of the bottle closest to her, grimacing at the stickiness under her palm. “Oh, ugh. Definitely _something_ spilled on that floor. Glad that’s not _my_ shoes standing in that mess.” Oliver snorted and shook his head, and Felicity turned towards him. “Oliver, do we have water?”  
   
He turned, broom in hand, and followed her gaze to the sink behind the bar which remained, miraculously, attached to the wall. “We do, in the bathrooms and downstairs. That sink’s pipes have a leak, so if you’re hoping for water, you’re not gonna get it here.”  
   
Felicity made a face at that news, clenching and unclenching her sticky hand to get a feel for how much the sensation was going to bother her. She shuddered at the noise it made. “Well, I guess it’s actually a good thing then that public door handles kinda creep me out.”  
   
She pulled her bag into her lap with her clean hand and dug into one of the inner pockets, emerging with a packet of wet wipes. Taking one for herself, she offered the pack to John and Oliver in turn. Oliver used his to clean the dust from his hands, while John put his to use on the dirty, sticky bottles of alcohol lined up before them.  
   
After wiping her palm clean, Felicity did the same, attacking the bottle in front of her anew and wiping the worst of the grime from the neck and front so that she could read the label. She went through three more wet wipes and three more bottles before she found a promising wine. Before tucking it, wrapped in her discarded bar rag, into her bag, she met Oliver’s eyes for approval one last time. His smile and nod made her feel a bit better about just _taking_ it, though she couldn’t stop herself from asking, “Do I even want to know how expensive this bottle you’re just letting me waltz right out the door with is?”  
   
Oliver’s smiled widened to a slightly mischievous grin. “You really don’t. Though, honestly, Felicity, I think I’d consider it paid for to see you _actually_ waltz out the door with it.” She stuck her tongue out at him and he laughed.  
   
“Well, since you’re just passing out high-end liquor, Ebenezer Queen,” John waggled his eyebrows, drawing his teammates’ attention, “there is a damn fine malt whiskey over here that I would love to give a new home.”

As Oliver looked at the bottle lifted in Diggle’s hand, the smile faded from his mouth and the light in his eyes dimmed, and Felicity realized how shallow the mirth had gone, how thinly it had covered his weary grief. Now, it sat stark and naked on his face, but it lasted only a moment before he smoothed his features into something less obviously broken.

It was too late, though, and John eyed Oliver carefully, concern wrinkling his brow and watchfulness sharpening the look in his eyes. Felicity twisted her fingers together, unwittingly holding her breath, as John asked, “Everything okay, man? Something I said?”

“No, it’s just—” Oliver shook his head, almost more a move to bring him back to himself than to deny anything. “It’s fine. It’s just… that was Tommy’s favorite. Expensive as hell, really, not easy to get. He had a bottle ordered in special to keep behind the bar, with strict orders not to actually serve it to anybody but him or me. After he… after he quit the club, I actually forgot it was even there.” He ran a hand over his jaw, stubble rasping, his eyes still locked on the bottle now cradled in both Diggle’s hands.

Diggle immediately held the bottle out towards Oliver. “Take it, Oliver. This obviously needs to go home with you.”

Oliver’s hand reached out, seeming to precede actual thought, and for a moment he hesitated, fingers curling back to his palm, before he seemed to make a decision and took the whiskey from John. He pulled it closer, looking down at the label as if it could tell him something, anything, some answer to any of the million unanswerable questions left in Tommy’s wake.

“You know what…” Felicity actually startled at the sound of Oliver’s voice, but when he looked up at her, then John, he wasn’t falsely cheery or raw and open, just a slightly more honest shade of neutral. “How about we do a toast. To Tommy. I think I do want to keep the bottle, Digg, but to be honest, I never much liked this shit. I only drank it when Tommy did. So, how about one last drink, in Tommy’s honor.”

Diggle’s expression was as carefully calm as Oliver’s, but the quirk at the corner of his mouth spoke of genuine fondness and appreciation. “Yeah, man. Sounds good.”

Oliver looked at Felicity, and she realized he was waiting for her to agree. As if she could, or would, refuse such a request. For a moment, she heard again the echoes of Tommy’s last few words and swallowed thickly. “Yes. I mean, yeah, sure. That’s—that’s really touching, actually. I’d like that, if you don’t mind.”

Her cheeks warmed slightly at the awkward jumble of words that fell out of her mouth, but Oliver’s lips curved softly in response, and she answered with a small, slightly chagrined smile of her own.

John turned and rooted in a low cabinet, emerging with three small tumblers. “Would you believe these survived—and are even clean?”

Felicity pursed her lips and tilted her head as she accepted hers from him. “No, I don’t think  I would, but right now I think I will choose to anyway.”

John chuckled, and Oliver poured a shallow finger’s worth of whiskey into each of their glasses.

After he capped and set aside the bottle, they each lifted their glass, and John and Felicity looked to Oliver, waiting. He stared down into the amber liquid, swirling it gently, and after a moment, he pushed air through his nose, a quiet scoff. “You propose a toast, you’re supposed to know what to say. But I don’t. I haven’t… I haven’t got the damn words.”

John shifted his weight from one foot to the other, and Felicity suspected he was refraining from laying a hand on Oliver’s shoulder in solidarity. Felicity tucked her lips between her teeth, looking from one man to the other, both missing a brother like other soldiers were missing limbs.

Felicity licked her lips and straightened her spine, quietly clearing her throat to gain Diggle and Oliver’s attention. “What about just… to Tommy.”

Oliver met her eyes, and after a moment, nodded almost imperceptibly. Raising his glass again, he said, “To Tommy.”

John echoed him, and they lifted their glasses to their mouths.

The men knocked their whiskey back in a single swallow, but Felicity, who had never been a big whiskey fan, sipped more slowly, gaze scanning absently over what remained of the bar—and when it snagged by the beer taps, her eyes flew wide.

There stood Tommy Merlyn, looking every inch like she’d seen him in the club any number of times—hair casually, expensively tousled, dressed like money and good taste in an expensive dark navy suit with the jacket open over a pale blue button-down, two buttons undone at the collar. He leaned easily against the counter, weight propped on an elbow and ankles crossed. He looked just the same as when she had thought she’d seen him earlier at the funeral—just the same as the hallucination that had leaned over her when she woke up.

And in just that moment, he lifted his eyes from the gritty, grimy floor, and they met hers—and widened, shock, then recognition breaking over his face like a wave, then a triumphant grin that struck like a spear of ice through her chest.

Felicity gasped, which, seeing as how she’d still had the glass of whiskey raised and tipped to her lips, brought a rush of liquor burning right down to her lungs. Glass slamming heavily on to the counter, she bent double, hacking and coughing, eyes streaming as her lungs fought simultaneously to expel the alcohol she’d inhaled and to draw a breath. A hand started pounding at her back and she flinched, momentarily thinking the ghost—delusion?—she’d seen of Tommy might be on the other end. She lifted her head enough to glare through her tears at a bemusedly concerned Oliver, who raised his eyebrows and made a show of pulling his hands away.

Diggle handed her a napkin scrounged from god only knew where, and she pressed it to her mouth while the spasms faded from her diaphragm. When at last she could breathe, she wiped the dampness from her red cheeks and grimaced at the watchful men—only two. No Tommy to be seen.

“So… turns out I can’t breathe whiskey,” she rasped. “Guess I’ll be striking that off my list of possible mutant powers.”

Oliver and John chuckled, and the glasses were put to rest in the sink, and then they took their leave. There was little conversation in the car on the drive back to Felicity’s apartment, and what she participated in, she wouldn’t later be able to recall. The entire ride, it was all she could do not to fall into the growing, white-noise haze of panic and confusion welling up in the back of her head.

One way or another—either by guilt-induced hallucinations, or beyond-the-grave impossibilities—Felicity was being haunted by Tommy Merlyn.


	3. Dead hearts are everywhere

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I know it's been just over a YEAR since I last updated this story, and that this chapter is short... but, well, I figured this was better than nothing?

Later, Felicity would be a little amazed that she had made it through the car trip home and the elevator ride to her apartment floor before freaking out.  
   
As she walked down the hallway, keys rattling in her nervous hand, her breathing became more rapid and a cold, damp sweat broke out on the back of her neck.  
   
She didn’t even remember unlocking the door and passing through the entry. Her next conscious moment was of setting her bag down on the kitchen counter and opening the fridge to deposit her new bottle of wine between Sunday’s Chinese takeout and—and the Tupperware box that contained bags of John Diggle’s and Oliver Queen’s blood.  
   
For a moment, Felicity stood staring, dumbstruck, before she remembered she had thought to smuggle the most incriminating evidence in the foundry—and with her computers purging their hard drives as the ceiling threatened to come down, the blood was absolutely the most incriminating of all the evidence she would have to leave behind—out with her, packed in the bag slung across her chest, in her desperate escape from Verdant post-quake.  
   
She had entirely forgotten that little detail, much less that she had hidden the half dozen blood bags, disguised in Tupperware as leftovers, _in her refrigerator_ , for _weeks_. As the open fridge bathed her in cold air and soft yellow light, the absurdity of that juxtaposition in her small, domestic space—Chinese takeout and emergency medical supplies, side by side—tipped her over the last edge of calm.  
   
Letting out a little frustrated roar, Felicity slammed the fridge closed and spun in one move, her hand flashing out to slam the switch for the overhead kitchen light by the doorway. “When did this become _my life!_ ”  
   
As she turned back around, ready to burst into a frenzy of compensatory housecleaning, she found Tommy Merlyn standing awkwardly next to her high-top kitchen table, suit jacket gone and sleeves rolled up to the elbows, hands shoved deep in his pants pockets.

Smiling crookedly at her open-mouthed, wide-eyed expression, he shrugged and, very clearly, said, “Hell if I know, but from here I gotta say it’s damn weird.”  
   
Belatedly, Felicity shrieked and jerked backwards, stumbling over her own feet and slamming her back into the wall between doorjamb and refrigerator. Eyes wide and burning from refusing to blink, she stared at him while her left hand groped blindly for something, anything, any kind of weapon. Her fingers found purchase, and she snatched the item, immediately hurling it towards the—ghost? Apparition? Hallucination?

Tommy—dead, inexplicable Tommy—watched the sad, fluttering descent of the dish towel that had hung from her fridge’s door handle, expression oddly pitying as it settled to the ground less than halfway between them.

“Wow, that was both rude _and_ pathetic.” He sighed almost theatrically, shoulders moving with impossible breath under his crisp blue shirt. “I guess I can’t really expect everyone to have a shotgun for home defense.” His eyes snapped back up to her face, clear and bluer than his shirt and twinkling with amusement. “Probably for the best; I’d hate for you to go blowing holes in your kitchen walls on my account.”

“Y—y—y-you, you,” Felicity stammered, pressing herself harder against the wall, as if she might pass through it and into a world that made sense again.

“Me,” Tommy prompted with exaggerated patience.

His tone was so drippingly condescending it actually snapped Felicity slightly out of her panic, enough that she threw him a disgusted glare, then heatedly accused, “You’re _dead_.”

Tommy’s hands emerged from his pockets and he folded his arms indignantly across his chest. “Really,” he drawled, deadpan. “I hadn’t noticed. Tell me, whose funeral was it that you attended today, because for some reason I could have _sworn_ it was _mine_.”

Suddenly, Felicity felt like she couldn’t get enough air, and like the floor was trying to slip out from under her. “You can’t be here,” she gasped. “This is impossible. I’m losing my mind, this isn’t real, oh my god, _you can’t be here_.”

Tommy unfolded his arms and stood straight, looking at her in concern. “Yet here I—holy shit, hey.”

Just then, Felicity’s knees buckled and she began sliding down the wall. As she reached the floor, she watched through narrowing tunnel vision as Tommy scrambled around the center island towards her, crouching down to her new eyelevel scant feet away.

“Hey, hey, hey,” he waved a hand in front of her face, brows furrowed as he watched her eyes track the motion. “Felicity, listen to me, you need to breathe, breathe more _slowly_ , you are hyperventilating. Lean over, put your head between your knees.”

Latching on to the clipped, firm calm of his voice, Felicity did as instructed, her view now of the linoleum tiling and the shiny toes of his black dress shoes. “Good, that’s good. Now, breathe in—and hold. Just hold that breath for a second. Now, exhale, slowly, slowly.”

Felicity squeezed her eyes shut as he instructed her soothingly when to inhale, when to exhale, until at last it felt like an iron band had been removed from around her chest. Tommy lapsed into silence and she breathed on her own, for a few moments drinking in the quiet and the dark behind her eyes, afraid to open them again.

When she finally screwed up the courage to lift her head and pry her tear-dampened lashes apart, she was dismayed to find that Tommy was still there, crouched with his elbows resting on his thighs, hands hanging between his knees, and an expectant, concerned look on his face. She groaned, sitting back against the wall and lightly banging the back of her head against it.

Scrubbing at her face with both hands, she looked to the ceiling and tried to blink her unsettled contacts back into place. “Did I _seriously_ just get guided through a mini panic attack by a projection of my apparently burgeoning insanity?”

“Yes, and no,” Tommy replied. “You _did_ just almost have a panic attack, which, wow, I probably should have expected that might happen. But I do take exception to the whole ‘projection of your insanity’ thing. Being _dead_ , yet still here was hard enough to come to terms with, thanks, you don’t get to explain me away as a break with reality.”

Felicity laughed, a bitter bark, and raked her eyes over him critically. “You know, I’d say I don’t remember you being this much of a smartass when you were, y’know, _alive_ , except I really didn’t know you well enough to remember how much of a smartass you might or might not be. I am, in fact, astonished, freaking _flabbergasted_ by the staggering amount of detail my subconscious apparently managed to soak up about you. Definitely disappointed this is how my brain sees fit to make use of my apparently fantastic subconscious memory.”

Tommy’s jaw flexed like he was grinding his teeth, and one lazily raised eyebrow expressed entire worlds of commentary. “So what I’m taking away from the massive amounts of denial coming out of your mouth is you haven’t done this before.”

Felicity gave him a look which, ironically, seemed to imply _he_ was the one out of his mind. The unadulterated, scornful incredulity illustrated in the alignment of her features struck him as unbearably funny, and he launched himself back and to his feet with a harsh laugh.

“ _Done_ this before?” Felicity did not limit the scorn to her face as she scrambled against the wall to stand without coming any nearer to him, her voice practically snapping with it like a whip. “ _Done this before_? No! _No_ , I have _not_ had a complete mental breakdown, brought on by crippling stress and guilt and hundreds of lives on my conscience, _before_!”

Standing now, she began to edge slowly towards the doorway to the hall, still plastered to the wall and eyes locked on him. Tommy watched her inch along, hands slipping into his pockets as he drawled, “Well, it’s been a while since I’ve been a girl’s first.”

Her lips pursed up tight in a look of blistering disgust—only slightly ruined by the brief tremble in her chin, and subsequent dash for freedom as her hand met the doorjamb.

Tommy sighed. She was running? Really?

Felicity’s feet slapped on the hardwood of her hallway, launching her not at the front door, but into her living room. Her hand slapped the wall once, twice, finding the switch and turning it on as her eyes frantically scanned for—a weapon? Her sanity?

They snagged instead on Tommy.

He stood by her couch, leaning one elbow on the back, hip cocked and one foot crossed over the other ankle. “Hi.”

Her brows screwed up in consternation, mouth opening and closing like a fish. “How…?”

Tommy straightened and threw his hands in the air, eyes rolling. “Dead! I’m _dead_ , and apparently being a ghost does actually come with a bag of tricks.” He grinned at her, brassy and a little false. “This one I actually kind of just figured out, don’t totally have the hang of it yet. But yeah, I can teleport or apparate or whatever if I think about it hard enough.”

Felicity blinked, momentarily startled out of her fear. “You read Harry Potter?”                            

Tommy went still and blinked back at her, the tips of his ears going inexplicably pink. “ _That’s_ what you got out of that?”

She hovered just inside the doorway, heartbeat slowly lowering as her brain whirred over that particular detail. “I mean—I just… Tommy Merlyn never struck me as a ‘reads novels for fun’ kind of guy. Definitely not a ‘kids’ British fantasy’ sort of recreational reading guy.” She frowned, gaze shifting to the floor and fingertips pressing into her temple as a sort of yawning dread opened quietly in her chest—what if she really was just… losing it? “It seems more like the kind of thing my subconscious would fill in to a hallucination. I don’t know, to make you less threatening. Or more relatable. Something.”

The toes of Tommy’s shoes interrupted her vision, even though there was no sound at all of him crossing the carpet towards her. “Thea used to be into them. Oliver wasn’t interested, but Thea couldn’t get enough. She wasn’t my sister, but… I liked feeling like she was. I started reading them to give her somebody to talk to about them.” Felicity looked up at him, but he was staring at the wall to her right, a soft, somewhat sad smile on his face. “It was our thing. We dragged Oliver to the first three movie premieres. The fourth one was just me and her. The fifth one…” Tommy’s smile died. “We didn’t go see. After that, she stopped reading them. I couldn’t, though.”

Felicity stared at him, lips parted as she traced back to realize the fifth movie came out not long after the _Gambit_ went down. She could guess why Thea wasn’t interested in seeing it—and also why Tommy couldn’t give the series up, not when he’d lost so much else.

Pulling in a long, shaky breath, she glanced at the ceiling to blink sudden prickling from her eyes. “I could—I could be making this up. I’ve always had a really active—overactive, according to my mother—um, imagination.”

She brought her gaze back to Tommy— _still there_ —to find him smirking, arms folded loosely together. “Thea still has the first movie poster hanging in her bedroom. Signed by the cast. I got it for her for her birthday one year.”

Felicity scoffed, tension rising again. “As if I could possibly ever verify what’s hanging on the walls of _Thea Queen’s_ bedroom.” She whirled again, hands bracketing her temples before sliding back over her tied-back hair. “I can’t believe I’m arguing with—probably _myself_. This is ridiculous. It’s _insane_.”

“Hey, are you gonna have a panic attack again?” Tommy asked, coming around her side to tilt his head at her curiously. “Should we find you a bag to breathe in?”

Felicity turned her face away, resolutely ignoring him. “Just in your head, Felicity. This is _not happening_. You need to—call someone. Or go to bed.”

Tommy clenched his jaw at being ignored, nostrils flaring as he asked in annoyance, “Who you gonna call?” He briefly broke out in a sarcastic grin. “ _Ghostbusters_?”

Helpless against a pun, Felicity shot him a “really?” look, then furtively darted her gaze away.

“But seriously,” Tommy gritted out, jaw squared. “You gonna call Oliver? And what, tell him his dead best friend that he buried today is being a pest? _That’ll_ go over well. And if you go to sleep, you’ll just have whatever nightmare was fucking with you earlier again.”

Felicity stilled with her back now turned to him, turning her head to peer at him nervously over her shoulder. He leaned against the wall, shoved his hands back in his pockets and shrugged.

“I keep showing up where you are. It doesn’t make sense, or it didn’t before you could _see_ me. I’ve been around the past couple of nights.” His eyes lowered, and he looked a little bashful. “You haven’t been sleeping well.”

Sighing in defeat, Felicity turned to him. “Setting aside that if you are, in fact, _not_ a projection of my newly developed mental breakdown, watching me sleep is super creepy…” Her brows pinched together, and she stared at him hard. “What do you mean, you keep showing up where I am?”

Tommy straightened, face brightening eagerly as he felt her giving ground. “I mean I don’t sleep but, like, I lose stretches of time or whatever if I lose focus for a while, and then I pop up usually somewhere I wasn’t before. It took me a little while to notice, but the most consistent factor every time was _you_. I showed up here—and I’d never even _been_ here before when I was alive, so let’s just say that was fucking _disconcerting_ —and I’d show up at the club, or at QC, or on the street downtown.” He leaned forward slightly, a bright light in his eyes, speaking more and more rapidly now that she seemed liked she might believe him. “Oliver was around a lot of the time, so I thought it was because of him, you know?”

Reluctantly, Felicity nodded. She kind of _did_ spend a fair amount of time around Oliver.

“But some of the time, he wasn’t around. But I realized you _were_. Almost every time.” Caught up in his excitement, Tommy stepped forward, looking down at her now like he didn’t quite understand her; like she was a puzzle. “I don’t know why yet, but for whatever reason, Felicity Smoak, I seem to be haunting you.”

**Author's Note:**

> This is how I exorcise my Tommy feels. Fair warning, I'm rusty on my fic and so posting may be somewhat inconsistent. I also can't promise to keep coming up with relevant chapter titles but I'm damn well gonna try.


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